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Approaches to the translation of children’s literature A review of critical studies since 1960 Reinbert Tabbert College of Higher Education, Schwäbisch Gmünd
Children’s literature, a traditional domain of teachers and librarians, has, in the past 30 years, been made a subject of academic research. Simultaneously, more and more studies have been dedicated to the translation of children’s literature. There are four important factors which have prompted such studies: (1) the assumption that translated children’s books build bridges between different cultures, (2) text-specific challenges to the translator, (3) the polysystem theory which classifies children’s literature as a subsystem of minor prestige within literature, and (4) the age-specific addressees either as implied or as real readers. This review of critical approaches to the translation of children’s literature is structured in such a way that the methodological shift from source orientation to target orientation becomes obvious. Keywords: translation of children’s literature, history of Translation Studies
International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) was founded, an organisation which has actively advanced the quality and distribution of children’s books (among other things with the biennial awarding of the Hans Christian Andersen Medal to children’s authors and illustrators such as Astrid Lindgren, Erich Kästner, Maurice Sendak or Mitsumasa Anno. The biennial awards are accompanied by certificates for outstanding translations of children’s books nominated by the national IBBY sections). In 1970 the more academically oriented International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL), which holds biennial symposia followed. It now has 236 members from 41 countries. Children’s literature, a traditional concern of educationists and librarians, has in some countries gained a foothold in university departments of literature. There are also research institutes in places such as Cologne, Frankfurt, Helsinki, London, Osaka, Paris, Stockholm, Vienna and Zürich, not to mention the International Youth Library in Munich, founded back in 1949 and now a treasure-house of research material in numerous languages. It is true that children’s literature is preferably studied in the mother tongue, but scholars of foreign as well as of comparative and general literature have also turned to it (see the surveys by Petzold 1997; Nières 1983; O’Sullivan 1996; 2000), as have special issues of journals addressed at them (Poetics today 13:1/1992; Compara(i)son 2/1995). International encyclopedias of children’s literature have appeared, listing translations of children’s books and discussing cross-cultural phenomena including translation (Doderer 1976–84; Hunt 1996; KümmerlingMeibauer 1999). The professional interest in children’s books has always encompassed a minority’s attention to the translation of such books. If the focus of attention is changing, this is due not only to the fact that scholars of literature have taken over from educationists and librarians, but also to the circumstance that their concepts have been influenced by more recent theories of translation. Moreover, a few representatives of Translation Studies have themselves become involved in children’s literature (Reiss; Toury; Nord; Oittinen; Puurtinen, etc.). 1.2 A shift of focus in the studies of translation What are the more recent objectives of the studies of translation? On the one hand the process and product of translating are being analysed more precisely, and on the other, corpora of translation literature are being investigated with regard to the historical conditions, particularly norms, which have shaped them.
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In either case a prescriptive approach (what should a translation be like?) has been replaced by a descriptive one (what is a translation really like?), and exhortations to do justice to the peculiarities of the source text have given way to considerations of the functions of the target text either for the commissioner or for the receiving culture. This at least is the picture drawn by those who have paved the way for new research: Hans Vermeer (Heidelberg) with his “skopos” theory (which, as the Greek keyword indicates, gives top priority to the “purpose” of a translation) and Gideon Toury (Tel Aviv) with his “descriptive translation studies” (based on history and cultural semiotics). Toury (1995: 25) states that in the second half of the 70s both schools contributed independently to a change of paradigm: from “source-orientedness” to “target-orientedness”. It is not the source text and the source culture any more which are of primary interest, but the target text and the target culture. Traditional translation theory is centred on the concept of equivalence: Translators are assumed to match the peculiarities of a source text with equivalent words and structures in their target text. This concept, which is in any case of little help in a particular case of translation, can no longer be taken for granted. If this means the sacrifice of a certain moral obligation to the author, Christiane Nord (Heidelberg/Magdeburg) has attempted to establish a new ethical framework. What matters, she says, is not the “fidelity” to the original text, but the “loyalty” to the initiator of the translation (1989; 1991). However, she asserts that in our culture the purpose of translation must not contradict the author’s intention, especially in the case of literary texts (1989: 102). So target-orientedness is the order of the day; nevertheless in analyses of translation literature the source text retains its importance as a factor of reference, though comparisons now have to be descriptive, not evaluative. It no longer makes sense to differentiate strictly between (“faithful”) translation and (“free”) adaptation, a stock classification in children’s literature criticism (Skjønsberg 1979; 1982; Escarpit 1985; Binder 1985). And in view of the shift of attention towards the target culture translation research imperceptibly passes into (foreign language) reception research. Analyses of translations which were carried out before the change of paradigm may still be valid, if one neglects the usual assumption — specially with regard to literary texts — that there is such a thing as “the” perfect translation.
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1.3 Scope and perspective of this review The present article is an extended version of a contribution to the yearbook of the German research society for children’s literature (Tabbert 1996). If the original text dealt with critical approaches to the translation of children’s literature between 1975 and 1995, either in theoretical works or in significant case studies of children’s books written in German (be it as a source or as a target language), the present article attempts to overcome such restrictions in a linguistic as well as a temporal respect. However, this cannot be more than an attempt, as it appears to be impossible to track down all the relevant publications and because I do not have the linguistic prerequisites to read all of those that have passed through my hands. My perspective is not that of a scholar of translation studies as is the case of Tiina Puurtinen in her chapter on recent theoretical approaches to translation (for children) (Puurtinen 1995: 35–62). Though my first academic publication was concerned with a typology of literary translation (Tabbert 1968), my vantage point is that of a German Professor of English who has become more and more involved in Comparative Children’s Literature and who is particularly interested in fiction from English- and German-speaking countries. My position may not be too disadvantageous, however, considering the fact that the largest number of children’s books are written in English, with quite a substantial amount in German, and that the same seems to be true with regard to published work on the translation of children’s literature. Nevertheless I regret that I cannot do justice to all the titles listed in my bibliography, let alone those which have escaped my attention. For some of the titles I am grateful for hints from fellow-researchers: Werner Küffner, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Isabelle Nières, Maria Nikolajeva, Emer O’Sullivan, Zohar Shavit, Denise von Stockar, Astrid Surmatz, Gideon Toury. Since the emphasis of this survey is on the change of paradigm in the studies of translated children’s literature, no great effort has been made to include more than a fair share of studies from before the mid-seventies. Persson’s book from 1962, which crops up as the oldest relevant title in several publications, seems to be a good starting-point. The whole presentation of research work will be structured in a way that helps illustrate the methodological shift from source-orientedness to target-orientedness. Finally a selection of articles is presented in which translators summarise their professional experience so that, despite all the theory, attention is also paid to practice.
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It may be worth mentioning in advance that some children’s books have been made the subject of several translation studies, an indication of their status as international classics. The titles include: Louisa May Alcott’s Little women (Skjønsberg 1979; Du-Nour 1995: 341–342; Nières 1998: 111–113), Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz (Toury 1980; Görlach 1982a/b; 1993; 1995; 1997; Marx 1997), Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (Koppen 1980; Escarpit 1985: 177–179; Marx 1990; 1997; Wunderlich 1992; Gómez del Manzano/Manila 1996), Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump (Eriksson 1985; Heldner 1992; Even-Zohar 1992; Surmatz 1994; 1998; Camp 1995; Teodorowicz-Hellman 1997; 1999) and A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (O’Sullivan 1994; 2000: 261–264; Fernandez Lopez 1996: 285–290; Woodsworth 1996; Weissbrod 1999). In the case of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in wonderland, likely to be the absolute favourite of translation criticism, there are not only plenty of studies (Parisot 1971; Mango 1977; Lehnert-Rodiek 1988; Nières 1988; Nord 1993; Oittinen 1993; 1997; 2000; Friese 1995; Weissbrod 1996; O’Sullivan 1998a; 2000), but also books which list further translations and further studies of them (Weaver 1964; Guiliano 1980; Jones and Gladstone 1998). Kümmerling-Meibauer’s (1999) encyclopedia articles on 534 children’s classics from 65 countries are followed by bibliographies which also include analyses of translations. Fairy-tales, though sometimes regarded as children’s literature, deserve a chapter of their own in Translation Studies. Here a reference to a recent publication (Sutton 1996) and its review in Target (Dollerup 1998) must suffice. A final remark concerning the following survey of studies is necessary: If a study has been published in English as well as in another language, the English version is preferred; and if it has been published both as an article and as part of a book, it is the book which is quoted.
2. The import of children’s books into various countries Children’s books from foreign countries can be regarded as a political phenomenon. They make critics aware of the fact that they themselves belong to a certain nation, culture or power bloc; and they sometimes make them ask questions about the use, the origin, the quantity and the nature of those books. There are several collections of papers in which authors attempt to answer such questions, either as representatives of countries and institutions or — as the state of the art develops — as distanced scholars.
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Persson’s collection (1962) is typical of the post-war years up to 1970 in that it appears to show in unquestioned unison the efforts of librarians, editors and translators in pursuit of a sheltered childhood and international understanding. While the Danish librarian Aase Bredsdorf explains that children’s libraries in small countries have a special need for translated books in certain categories, the American librarian Virginia Haviland stresses the enrichment given to American children by books from other countries. The Swedish book editor Margareta Schildt points out that every year about 50% of new children’s books in her country are translations and she gives aesthetic as well as commercial criteria for the choice of foreign books. Particularly interesting is what the British editor and translator Monica Burns has to say about the work of the translator. In astonishing frankness she agrees with the demand that “Children’s books must be tailored to their new country” (Persson 1962: 78). She adds that the “tailoring may fall partly on the translator and partly on the editor”, and she illustrates this policy with texts which were adapted for religious, political or moral reasons. Rarely will target-language oriented scholars find a less disguised plea for the subjection of translation to conventions, in this case the shared belief, initiated by Rousseau, that children have to be protected against anything culturally unfamiliar or morally unbecoming. This leaves little room for vicarious experience of foreignness. The volume by Klingberg/Ørvig/Amor (1978), a documentation of the third symposium of the IRSCL, goes beyond Persson (1962) in so far as it is more academically oriented and presents papers from both sides of the Iron Curtain. However, the authors from East Europe appear to be even more officially representative of their countries than those in Persson’s volume, stressing their countries’ policy of promoting humanistic traditions and international understanding through translated children’s books. As opposed to that bias, authors from Western countries uncover the way in which the international production of children’s books in capitalist countries determines selection processes with regard to subject-matter and form, and helps to spread Western ideology in the Third World. Two historically oriented studies pursue and explain the predominance of English children’s books on the Danish and Swedish book markets since the second half of the 19th century. The East – West division is also present in Binder’s collection of essays (1985), which offers an overview of translated children’s books in the countries where German is spoken (at that time four). The impact of the two power blocs on the choice of children’s books from foreign countries is particularly evident in an encyclopedia article by Breitinger (1979), who contrasts the share of
Approaches to the translation of children’s literature 309
translated children’s books from the USA and the USSR in West Germany (32% / 4%) and East Germany (5% / 35%). The publication of the few books from the USSR in West Germany is related to events in foreign policy in an article by Seemann (1998; much more detailed and including summaries of the translated books in a 463-page study of 1999). Breitinger’s diagnosis of the impact of the political power blocs is confirmed by Tabbert (1998) with regard to translated books which were awarded the (West) German Children’s Book Prize between 1955 and 1995. But Tabbert adds that the juries’ predilection for books from English-speaking countries, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, which neglects not only East but also South European societies, may also be due to a shared image of childhood, which dates from Rousseau and is favoured by industrialised Protestant countries of the European and the American North. (While that image implies that children should be regarded as human beings in their own right, South European societies tend to consider them as incomplete adults, whilst Communist ideology emphasizes that adults and children live in the same world.) The traditional German reception of children’s classics from Britain is exemplified by Petzold (1994), and more recent German imports from various parts of the world are discussed in four contributions to Raecke (1999: 196–235). In Switzerland, a country with four official languages, the question of translation is precariously tied up with national identity, as Elisabeth Külling’s contribution to Binder (1985) makes clear. Verena Rutschmann (Rutschmann/ von Stocker 1996: 6–22) presents interesting conclusions from empirical inquiries into children’s reading preferences in the three main language areas of Switzerland: The preferences are shaped by the literary tradition and childhood image of the culture whose language the children share (thus Pinocchio comes first for those who read Italian), and additional reading needs are satisfied by translated books not from the other two language areas, but from Englishspeaking countries. Denise Escarpit (1985) demonstrates the situation of children’s book translation in France in a kaleidoscopic manner, thanks to a great variety of contributors and materials. There are considerations of the problem of translation from the point of view of a semiotician, a librarian and a comparatist; there are statistics of the French import of children’s books in the past and in the present; there are case studies of translated children’s books from Italy, the USA and Britain; there is the portrait of an influential translator of the 18th century (Arnaud Berquin); and there are statements of one author, five éditeurs and four translators. Scholars have the upper hand (as in Klingberg/Ørvig/Amor 1978, from
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which Klingberg’s and Bamberger’s contributions are reprinted), but a certain amount of space is conceded to the producers of translated children’s books, who are no longer free to tell tales out of school (as they were in Persson 1962), but have to respond to a questionnaire. The methodological bias of the volume is that of source-text oriented philology. Denise Escarpit, the editor, has made herself a name as an Anglicist and as the fourth president of the IRSCL. Escarpit’s French-oriented kaleidoscope on translated children’s books has been supplemented by a special issue of a French journal dedicated to translation (La Revue des Livres pour Enfants 145. 1992). The contributions to that issue focus on such topics as the translation of French children’s books in Norway, problems of translating a Russian folktale, an English alphabet book and poetry in general. Persson (1962) contains a publisher’s report on how American experts in the 50s and 60s chose American children’s books for publication in Asian languages, which contrasts with Jörg Becker’s criticism of ideological book exports to the Third World (Klingberg/Ørvig/Amor 1978). Ten years later the volume Development (1988) documents a UNESCO conference in Tokyo which offered countries of Asia and the Pacific a chance to present their national situation of children’s book translation. As one might guess, the range of states of development is very wide. Even the highly developed situation of Japan, which has an enormous import of children’s books, is hardly known to most experts in Europe and America. The first translations of Japanese fairy tales and children’s books into English and German since the end of the 19th century are outlined by Herring (1988). Glimpses of Japanese culture through translated children’s books are provided by Makino (1985). Ueno (1993) gives a survey of the Japanese reception of children’s books from German-speaking countries after World War II. In recent years the national import of children’s books has been examined in some academic monographs. Ingeborg Rieken-Gerwing’s doctoral thesis (1995) focuses on re-united Germany. The interesting question put forward in the title (Is there a special method of translating children’s literature?) does not result in any stimulating analyses or theories; however, the pragmatically oriented chapters provide useful information: on the one hand regarding the quantitative differentiation of translated children’s books according to book market statistics and to lists of prize-winning books or of semi-official book recommendations, and on the other hand regarding the working-conditions and methods of the (often part-time) translators, according to 46 questionnaires completed by translators and 14 questionnaires by employees of publishing-houses. The economic factor has been duly taken into account.
Approaches to the translation of children’s literature
Ewa Teodorowicz-Hellman (1999) presents her research on Swedish-Polish relations in the field of children’s literature. She has compiled a comprehensive bibliography of translations of Swedish children’s books into Polish between 1890 and 1998, which she elucidates in the first chapter of her study. Subsequent chapters, which are based on a variety of methodological approaches, are dedicated to the reception of outstanding works such as Elsa Beskow’s picture books and Swedish folktales. While the analysis of the Polish translation of Pippi Långstrump proceeds along traditional philological lines, the review of “reception styles” of Nils Holgersson represents an interesting variant of target orientation, insofar as the illustrations of the various Polish editions are shown to indicate radically different concepts of the book — from geographical work via adventure novel and fairy-tale to fantasy and Entwicklungsroman. Teodorowicz-Hellman’s bibliography indicates further studies of the reception of Western children’s books in Slavic countries, as for instance an investigation of British children’s books in Polish translations by Adamczyk-Garbowska (1988). Unfortunately that study, unlike Teodorowicz-Hellman’s has no chapter summaries in English. Fernandez Lopez (1996) and Zeli (n.d.) are fully aware of the change of translation theory. Therefore their investigations of translated children’s books in Spain and Italy respectively will be introduced in Chapter 5 (“The Impact of the Target Culture”). And as Valdivieso (1991) and Beuchat/Valdivieso (1992) are mainly interested in the aspect of culture, their studies of translated children’s books in Chile will be considered in Section 4.3 (“Culture-specific Phenomena”). The present chapter will conclude with some ideas concerning the quality and use of imported children’s books. The Austrian Richard Bamberger (1961; 1963; 1978) is a prominent representative of post-war critics of children’s literature who believed with Jella Lepman, the founder of the International Youth Library, that children’s books may contribute to “building bridges” between foreign cultures. He emphasises that the literary quality of translated children’s books is on average much better than the average of children’s literature in a given country, [which] is demonstrated by the fact that the percentage of translations on lists of recommended children’s books is much higher than the percentage of translations in the number of children’s books produced. (Bamberger 1978: 20)
He adds that in Scandinavia and the Netherlands children’s writers have been stimulated by the high amount of good imported books to produce work of a comparable standard. Referring to genres, well-known authors and achievements typical of a certain nation, he traces international lines of influence.
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The American Maureen White (1992) stresses the importance of children’s literature “as a medium for sharing common cultural interests” (261). In an approach which is both pragmatic and systematic she has identified 572 translated children’s books which were in print in the U. S. in 1990. From those books she selected 131 titles which she classified as “successful translated children’s books” according to the following criteria: at least four years in print and “an award-winner, on a notables list, or the recipient of a favourite review” (264). The list of 131 titles and seven tables interpreting them under various headings are useful material for further investigations. In the table concerning the original language, German comes first with 39 titles (followed by 17 in Swedish) and in the table of favourite authors the Grimms with 10 titles are just ahead of Astrid Lindgren with 9 titles. Similar to the situation in Germany (Tabbert 1998), cultural affinity seems to be a decisive asset in the U. S. for award-winners or otherwise successful books. Tomlinson (1998), on behalf of the U. S. IBBY section, is more comprehensive than White when he offers an annotated bibliography of over 700 titles from 29 different countries printed between 1950 and 1996, all of which are available in English, many originating in other English-speaking countries. Introductory articles on so-called “international children’s books”, statistics and tables make this publication a useful source for translation scholars. On a smaller scale this is also true for Susan Stan’s Study of international children’s picture books published in the United States in 1994 (1997). Out of 251 picture books originally published in other countries only 42 contain clear “indications in the text or illustrations that they are set in a country outside the U. S.” (quoted by Oittinen 2000: 150). In spite of such a limited representation of foreignness in “international children’s books”, educationists such as Rosie Webb Joels are convinced that “the canon of translated children’s literary work represents just one resource (but an excellent one) for promoting internationalism” (1999: 78).
3. Deviations from the source text Göte Klingberg, Swedish educationist and second president of the IRSCL, emphasises the aesthetic quality of children’s literature. “My concern is books of literary merit which in translation will mean a valuable addition to the literature available to children and young people” (Klingberg 1986: 7). He believes that in translated children’s books the integrity of the original work
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must be touched as little as possible and in a kind of manual for translators of children’s books categorises what he regards as typical deviations from the source text. Translations from English into Swedish and Swedish into English provide numerous examples. Most extensively he discusses the question of whether references to the source culture may be adapted to the target culture (his category of “local context adaptation”). In his openly prescriptive manner he tends to demand the preservation of the original references, if necessary with an added explanation, but he also concedes some exceptions (e.g. telling names in a geographical context, 52). Deviations he definitely rejects are “modernisation” (which, in his case, only involves the date and time of a story and explicitly excludes the problem of modernising the classics, 57), “purification” (i.e. the deletion of what adults in the target culture may consider to be taboo for children) and “abridgements” (which, more often than not, according to Klingberg, distort the meaning of a text). Klingberg’s book of 1986, which was preceded by two Swedish versions (1974, 1977), may be uninformed as regards new theories of translation, but it gives evidence of the attempt to take children’s literature seriously as literature. Katharina Reiss (1982), the translation scholar, has linked Klingberg’s categories with her own early theory of translation based on a typology of texts. The informative, expressive and operative text types, which she deduces from Karl Bühler’s functional model of language and supplements with an audiomedial type, may also be found in the field of children’s literature, e.g. the informative type in the shape of non-fiction for children. Reiss maintains that each type requires a specific form of equivalence, thus e.g. non-fiction “primarily the correct rendering of content” (1982: 9). One may doubt the practical use of the typology for the translation of children’s literature, as Tiina Puurtinen does in view of the fact that “most texts are a mixture of various elements” (1995: 58). But one may also further differentiate the typology by adding three more functions (aesthetic, phatic and metalingual) as Peter Newmark (1988: 39–44) does, following Roman Jakobson. The example Newmark chooses from Christian Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder to illustrate the aesthetic function is intriguing: In nonsense poetry, the sound-effect is more important than the sense: ‘Ein Wiesel sass auf einem Kiesel inmitten Bachgeriesel’/‘ A ferret nibbling a carrot in a garret’. (42)
Christiane Nord (1995) has demonstrated that text-functions as defined by Jakobson can be fruitfully used as a descriptive tool to compare titles of target
and source texts, including the titles of children’s books (see e.g. the expressive function in the Spanish picture book title Donde viven los monstruos as opposed to the American Where the wild things are, 277). Reiss identifies three factors which in translated children’s books frequently lead to deviations from the source text: (1) children’s imperfect linguistic competence, (2) the avoidance of breaking taboos which educationally minded adults might want to uphold, (3) the limited world knowledge of young readers. From a sociocritical point of view the publisher’s commercial interest may be added as a fourth and perhaps domineering factor. It is this factor which becomes recognisable in Cornelia Krutz-Arnold’s (1978) description of how thoroughly Enid Blyton’s adventure books have been tailored to the West German market (for comparable alterations in French Blyton editions see Geneviève Bordet in Escarpit 1985: 30–31 and Fernandez Lopez 2000: 32–34). In some cases nothing is left but “a certain resemblance of motives” between the German and the English version (61), not to mention those German Blyton novels that apparently do not originate in any English text. However, this is by no means a new phenomenon in the history of children’s literature. Anne-Lise Mooser (1993) points out that Johanna Spyri’s two volumes of Heidi were not only stripped of their aesthetic charm by their French translator, but also (because they sold so well) supplemented with three further volumes, the last one entitled Heidi grand-mère (see also Abgottspon 2001). There is a remarkable phenomenon in the diversified English-speaking world which deserves an extra paragraph. In 1990 Mary Hoffman documented the fact that “British publishers are becoming increasingly cautious about how they present American texts to English children. When they buy them at all, they make changes ranging from spellings to culture” (26). This astonishing form of “translation” (or cultural transfer) is a commercially motivated form of concession to “the many adults who mediate the books between writer and reader”, though without doubt the young British audience is well acquainted with unchanged American TV, cartoons, films and songs. Yet the interference in the transatlantic children’s book transfer is not a one-sided affair. Jane Whitehead has described a possibly even more common “Americanization of British children’s books” (1996: 687). “Titles, setting, character names, and culturally specific allusions may all be changed in addition to spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, and idiom”, and “the younger the child, the heavier the hand.” (688). The Israeli literary historian Zohar Shavit (1986: 111–130, earlier version 1981) favours a target-oriented approach to translation, which is based on the
Approaches to the translation of children’s literature
notion of literature as a polysystem, and would therefore belong in Chapter 5 (“The impact of the target culture”). Yet in this part of the review it may more suitably elucidate how the deviations from the source text in translated children’s literature are interpreted in the light of the new theory. From Shavit’s vantage point of cultural semiotics, textual manipulations are symptomatic not only of translated children’s literature, but of children’s literature in general, in so far as it is considered to be a sub-system of a minor status within the literary polysystem. There are five ways in which a text for children may be manipulated in translation: (1) affiliation to successful models in the target system (Gulliver’s travels, the satire, is turned into a fantasy story for children), (2) disrespect for the text’s integrality (the frequent case of abridgements), (3) reduction of complexity (e.g. by eliminating irony), (4) ideological adaptation (e.g. Campe’s adaptation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Rousseau’s pedagogical system), (5) adaptation to stylistic norms (e.g. to high literary style in Hebrew in order to enrich the child reader’s vocabulary). Deviations from the source text in translated children’s literature, which at first glance seem to be caused by the child reader’s stage of development (Reiss) and from a sociocritical standpoint by the capitalist market situation (KrutzArnold), in Shavit’s approach are seen even more generally as symptomatic of the minor cultural status of children’s literature. This concept seems to give an answer to a lot of questions, but suggests the unsatisfactory conclusion that anything of cultural value in the field of children’s literature (as, for instance, a successful translation) must be regarded as an exception to the rule.
4. Challenges of the source text In the wide field of translations of children’s literature there is a very special corner occupied by Manfred Görlach. Görlach is a German professor of English philology specializing in the history of the English language and in dialectology, who appears to have a great affection for linguistic metamorphoses of the German children’s classic Max und Moritz, a picture story composed of rhymed verse and cartoon-like pictures by Wilhelm Busch. Published in 1865, just as Alice in wonderland, it enjoys a comparable success in the country of its origin, but not beyond the border (though in the United States it instigated the genre of the comic strip). Görlach has made himself a name as a collector, initiator and editor of both foreign language and dialect versions of Max und Moritz (1982a, b, 1986), which he has also adopted as an object of his studies. Thus he
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has discussed “sociolinguistic determinants for literature in dialects and minority languages” with regard to various versions in German dialects (1993) and five versions in Scots dialects (1995). (Another German Anglicist, Walter Sauer, has published foreign language versions of Struwwelpeter, and German dialect versions of Struwwelpeter, Max und Moritz, Le petit Prince and Winniethe-Pooh without having the intention of contributing to the theory of translation.) Görlach regards Max und Moritz as a challenge which makes the translators (in the case of Scots all of them academics) mobilise the linguistic potential of their dialects. Assuming that not every language is equally equipped to fulfil certain functions, he believes that the source text “provides an excellent opportunity for a successful translation” into European dialects, “having as its subject an uneducated pre-industrial village community of a type that was similar all over 18th — 19th-century Europe” (1995: 229). Görlach has strong reservations about a Glaswegian version (229) and various versions in German city slang (1993: 152) and concludes: “Before translating a text into language X, the translator should make sure that there is an appropriate register for it” (1997: 230). Görlach’s criterion for a “successful” translation seems to be equivalence of effect or at least comparability (1993: 162). With this criterion in mind he considers the dialect translations according to linguistic levels: sounds (as in onomatopoetic ‘half-words’, names and rhymes), vocabulary, stylistic and sociolectal variation and localisation. He favours those versions which add “an authentic sound beyond proper spelling, syntax and lexis” so that “Scottish children are likely to recognise in the two laddies or loonies a reflection of themselves” (1995: 242). The question of “authenticity” seems to be particularly relevant under the heading of “localisation”. Thus e.g. the German dish Sauerkraut is replaced by Glaswegian “peas-brose” (1995: 241). In a passage in a recent exhibition catalogue which is dedicated to “translations of the drawings” (Görlach 1997: 34–36) Görlach points out that in the case of some Yiddish and Hebrew versions of Max und Moritz even pictorial representations of culture-specific phenomena have been substituted, e.g. an organ by a piano. There seem to exist no further discussions of the role of illustration in translation with regard to this classic picture story, except maybe in Chmeruk (1990). While Görlach, the linguist, concentrates on the linguistic challenges a piece of children’s literature offers to translators, Emer O’Sullivan, an Irish scholar specialising in children’s literature from German- and English-speaking countries, proposes a list of aspects worth considering in translated children’s
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books, which also takes literary categories into account. Constituting structural traits of a text, such categories conspicuously reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a translation. The five traits which O’Sullivan describes as “elements of a seminar on translating children’s literature” (1991/92) are: (1) interplay of picture and words in picture books, (2) cultural references, (3) playful use of language, (4) dialect, register, names, (5) the possibility of double address (of child and adult). The following sections of this chapter will discuss studies concerned with the items 1, 3 and 2. A later chapter will deal with item 5. As to item 4, there seem to be no special investigations of the difficult task of translating regional dialect or teenage jargon which tend to crop up in young adult novels (see Klingberg 1986: 70–71 on dialect and the brief section on German translations of teenage jargon in Peter Pohl’s Swedish Janne min vän and in Myron Levoy’s American Alan and Naomi — in Tabbert 1998: 105–106). 4.1 Pictures and words When Birgit Stolt (1978) compared the German illustrations of Astrid Lindgren’s Michel books with the originally Swedish ones she must have been one of the first to draw attention to the fact that pictures are an integral part of translating children’s literature. Riitta Oittinen (1990) regards the relation between text and illustration as a dialogic one which should be taken into account when a children’s book is translated into another language. A thorough treatment of the problem has been attempted by Isabel Maria Moreira da Silva (1991) in her unpublished thesis for a diploma in Translation Studies at the University of Heidelberg. She elucidates the role of children’s book illustration as a “latent problem of translation” (176, Peter A. Schmitt’s term) from the vantage point of various academic disciplines and applies her insights to a comparison of Alice Vieira’s illustrated Portuguese children’s book Flor de Mel (1986) with its newly illustrated German version Wenn Melinda kommt (1991: 158–175). If a certain degree of “indeterminacy” (Wolfgang Iser) in the Portuguese descriptions of settings is specified as Portuguese in the original illustrations, the German illustrator redefines some pictorial details as German, thus creating a discrepancy between the (“faithfully” translated) verbal text and its (new) illustrations. While da Silva considers this as due to the German illustrator’s ignorance about Portugal (174), examples of “cross-cultural” illustration in other translated children’s books seem to indicate conscious assimilation, e.g. the replacement of the “Mad tea party” in Alice in wonderland by a German Kaffeekränzchen (O’Sullivan 2000: 323).
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The special case of the picture book has been treated by the author of this review (Tabbert 1991), who in view of the equal importance of pictures and words in that medium, prefers the term “cultural transfer”, introduced by Hans Vermeer (1986) as an extension of the term “translation”. The point of departure of Tabbert’s approach is Bernd Spillner’s (1980) semiotic analysis of the Astérix comic books, which identifies the interplay of painted situation and pointed speech bubble wording as a comic-specific problem of translation. In most picture books the crucial interplay is that between a narrative text of rather a high degree of “indeterminacy” and the specifying pictures. Indeterminacy tempts the translator into a carefree attitude towards the source text, and since it is short, any deviation may be of greater consequence for its meaning than in the case of a long narration. A frequent disturbance of the original balance between words and pictures is caused by the fact that translators tend to put bits of information into the target text which in the original book is only conveyed by the pictures. This is particularly obvious in the American version of Michel Gay’s French picture book Papa Vroum (Tabbert 1991a: 133; a more detailed comparison in O’Sullivan 1998b: 110–113 and O’Sullivan 2000: 287–291). A confrontation of a number of important picture books in three languages with their translations reveals a tendency to turn autostereotypes and heterostereotypes of the source culture into those of the target culture (Tabbert 1991a: 134–142). Perhaps this observation can be taken as another proof of the guide-line articulated by an American editor of translated children’s books: “The younger the child, the heavier the hand” (Whitehead 1996: 688). An interesting case of both picture-text relation and cultural implications is presented by Ofelia Schultze-Kreft (1998: 171–175) in her discussion of the famous Swiss picture book Schellen-Ursli (1945, A bell for Ursli) and its two sequels, written by Selina Chönz in order to strengthen the minority language of Romansch, and outstandingly illustrated by the Romansch artist Alois Carigiet. Unlike the common practice, the original text, which is Romansch, is more detailed than the German translation, undertaken by the author herself. According to Schultze-Kreft (172) the original text had the additional function of instructing the artist about details concerning the characters and their world, and once these had been realised in the pictures, the author could omit them in her German version of the text. Only the Romansch spring custom of “Chalanda-marz”, which is central to the story and likely to be unknown to German readers, is described more extensively than in the original text. If in the cultural transfer of picture books the pictures are usually kept intact, whilst the text may be thoroughly altered, in the case of illustrated stories
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or novels totally new pictures may indicate a specific transformation of the whole work. This phenomenon has been touched upon in studies of the crosscultural reception of several classics, particularly Alice in wonderland (as to illustrations in French editions see Nières 1988: 857–901). As has been mentioned before, Teodorowicz-Hellman (1999: 49–60, 113) explicitly deduces from the style of illustration in various Polish editions that in her native country Nils Holgersson has been received in terms of different genres. A recent article on “anglo-visual” versions of the German children’s fairy tale “Hänsel und Gretel” gives evidence that cross-cultural illustrative reception can also be classified according to Bühler’s functional model of language (Tabbert 2002), which in the past was applied to a typology of translated poems (Tabbert 1968). Thus the expressive style of Anthony Browne’s autobiographically inspired picture book version is very different from Tony Ross’s pictorial appeal to the British sense of black humour; and textual manipulations corroborate the respective tendency. 4.2 Playful use of language Wordplay has been one of the attractions of children’s literature since Lewis Carroll questioned the dominance of didacticism with his Alice in wonderland (1865). As a problem of translation the phenomenon has been systematically and comprehensively investigated in Hans Grassegger’s study (1985) of Astérix comics, which may not have been produced specifically for young readers, but which seem to belong to their favourite reading material. Grassegger has compared the speech bubble texts of twelve French Astérix volumes with the corresponding wording in six European languages, especially German, English and Italian. Similar to the Bühler-Reiss text typology, it is not equivalents of content that translators have to look for, Grassegger says, but equivalents of form. The idea of playfulness (Spielgedanke) comes first, and hence the main result of Grassegger’s investigation is meant to be seen in a positive light: “For lack of morphological, lexical and syntactic equivalents in the target languages translators have to switch to types of wordplay which are different from those in the original” (100) and are more often than not “shifted about”, compared with the original. It is not only wordplay in a narrower sense (i.e. homophones, taking idiomatic phrases literally, etc.) that Sonia Marx (in Ewers/Lehnert/O’Sullivan 1994: 154–171; 1997: 155–178) is concerned with when she confronts Collodi’s Italian Pinocchio with 16 German variants, or Emer O’Sullivan (1992) when she
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compares Aidan Chambers’s English young adult novels with their respective German versions, but it is all sorts of linguistic humour. Collodi’s traditional art favours telling names, bizarre similes, hyperbole, tautologies and intentional break in style. Chambers, who openly shows the influence of James Joyce, has a liking for “the graphic dimension of the text” and for “incongruities between narrative form and content”. O’Sullivan’s title signals that, in the case of Chambers, cultural transfer means not only “loss”, but also “gain”, as his innovative use of language could give fresh impulses to children’s literature in the target culture. In a more recent article O’Sullivan (1999b) discusses the specific problem of translating what she calls “intertextual humour” in children’s literature. She traces this challenge for translators from novels by Roald Dahl and Aidan Chambers through picture books by Mitsumasa Anno and Janet & Alan Ahlberg (“interpictorial references”, Isabelle Nières) back to the parodies in Alice in wonderland. The title of her article highlights the successful translation of a spoonerism by Roald Dahl, the inversion of which refers to a prominent English author who in the German translation is replaced by a German one: From ‘Dahl’s Chickens’ to ‘Himmels Grausen’. Lewis Carroll’s playful use of language challenges not only the ever new generations of translators, but also critics of resulting translations in various languages. Recent critics (not so Weissbrod 1996: 224) tend to neglect the fact that Warren Weaver (1964), an American mathematician and Carroll collector, in a substantial preface to his comprehensive bibliography of translations of Alice in wonderland, has already convincingly distinguished five types of challenges, each of which he discusses with regard to translations in 14 languages: (a) parodied verse, (b) puns, (c) manufactured or nonsense words, (d) jokes which involve logic, (e) twists of meaning. Weaver’s 14 linguistic “collaborators” were distinguished persons (most of them scientists) who were well-versed in the language in which Weaver sent them Lewis Carroll’s chapter “A mad teaparty”. They were asked to comment on the peculiarities of the translation they had received and retranslate it into English. Weaver discusses the resulting material with regard to his five types of translational challenges and thus attempts a tentative answer to his question: “How can ‘Alice’ be translated?” Naturally, the results tend to be more professional if the analyst is a scholar of Literature or Translation Studies specialising in texts of the language at hand. Christian Enzensberger’s German version of the two Alice books, which appeared in 1963, has stimulated several professional studies. Gertrud LehnertRodiek (1988) concentrates on wordplay and parody and then turns to the
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general question of whether the translation should show foreignness or appear to be a text of the target culture (“documentary” or “instrumental” translation according to Nord 1989: 102–103). Lehnert-Rodiek believes that a text such as the Alice book has to be “naturalised” (eingebürgert) in order to be understood at all and that Enzensberger has achieved this though in a somewhat strained manner. She contradicts Susan Mango (1977) who considers Enzensberger’s equivalents to Carroll’s wordplay to be brilliant, but as a native of Britain regrets the translator’s target orientation, which she detects in the Germanisation of cultural references, occasional adaptation of the dialogue to child language, replacement of verbal and personal constructions by nominal and impersonal ones and a “slant to negativity” (78) both in syntax and lexis. In further studies of German versions of Alice (Friese 1995; O’Sullivan 1998a; 1999b; 2000: 296–378), which also include more recent translations, LehnertRodiek’s results are duly taken into account, but Mango’s subtle linguistic observations seem to find hardly any echo at all. Concluding from Isabelle Nières’s meticulous doctoral dissertation (1988) the reception of the Alice books seems to have been particularly effective in France. Nières dedicates a whole chapter (399–508) to a systematic outline of challenges to the translator, most of which are varieties of jeux de langage, which she names according to traditional rhetoric and structural linguistics, collects in lists and explains to her French readers. Of the five translators, whose Alice versions she discusses in another chapter (510–669), the last one, Henri Parisot, has published a detailed commentary on his translations of wordplay under the telling title “Pour franciser les jeux de langage d’ ‘Alice’” (1971: 67–82). Riitta Oittinen, though concerned with the three Finnish translations of Alice, does not treat the specific challenges of wordplay, at least not in her books published in English (1993; 2000). Rachel Weissbrod (1996) examines the problem in three Hebrew translations, and she does it in a norm-oriented manner, which can be more suitably summarised in Chapter 5. 4.3 Culture-specific phenomena As has been shown, cultural references as a challenge of the source text are discussed and catalogued by Klingberg (1986, “local context adaptation”) and also reflected upon by Görlach (1993; 1995, “localisation”). Klingberg’s demand for the preservation of the original references is shared by Cecilia Beuchat and Carolina Valdivieso (1992) in their comments on Spanish translations of children’s books read in Chile. “From an educational point of view” they
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emphasise that translated children’s books contribute “to the improvement of relations between different nations” and provide “knowledge about their unique and peculiar characteristics” (9). From a number of modern British classics they quote examples of translation problems posed by both material and (more difficult) non-material cultural differences and propose the kind of solution which means that ”the reader will have the feeling of being ‘transported’ into another world” (12). In a book publication of the Chilean research group around Valdivieso (1991), excerpts from English, German and French children’s books are reprinted together with their respective Spanish versions which are commented upon. Tanya Christa (1998) presents an interesting case study in her consideration of the German translation of Beth Roberts’s Australian children’s novel Manganinnie (1979), which introduces the reader into the world of Aboriginal culture in the 19th century. The Aboriginal words, which in the source text essentially contribute to the impression of “otherness” and are subtly elucidated by the context, are explicitly explained in the target text, thus destroying the air of authenticity. Another observation worth mentioning is the fact that due to “political correctness” the translator suppresses the German equivalent of the adjective “black”, with regard not only to the Aboriginal characters, but even to animals, and that she “whitewashes” war activities of the Aborigines. There are also semiotic approaches to the problem of coping with cultural differences. Maria Nikolajeva, a Swedish Anglicist of Russian origin, who supports Riitta Oittinen (1993) in her plea for reader-oriented translation of children’s books, draws on Yuri Lotman’s concepts of cultural context and semiosphere in order to heighten awareness of the systemic implications of cultural differences (Nikolajeva 1996: 27–34). She presents translation as a “scheme of interaction of contexts” (28): There is an overlap of the “semiotic space of the source-text reader” and of the “semiotic space of the target-text reader”, which constitutes “the zone of mutual understanding or translatability” (29). Referring to modern children’s books, Nikolajeva gives a number of examples of confrontations between three cultural contexts: the Swedish, the Soviet Russian and the American. Thus caviar, as cheap cod paste on sandwiches familiar to Swedish child readers, would make Russian children associate members of a privileged class; and just like this “everyday sign”, “relationship signs” may also cause misunderstanding by foreigners, e.g. Swedish school children’s habit of addressing their teachers by their first names. Though it may seem that “children’s literature is basically non-translatable, since children’s semiotic experience does not allow them to interpret the signs of an alien
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semiosphere”, Nikolajeva emphasizes that “Lotman’s model of cultural interaction is dynamic and provides for an approach to cultural understanding” (34). Noriko Shimoda Netley (1992) demonstrates in a case study of the Japanese version of Roald Dahl’s boisterous children’s book Matilda (1988) the degree to which the character of a story may be changed if the codes used in the target text are totally different from those constituting the source text. Netley’s methodological key is Roland Barthes’s concept of a text as a network of various codes (195). Dahl’s colloquial style is turned into formal written style in Japanese and, as Netley elaborates with regard to pragmalinguistic possibilities, narrative situation and depicted school life, this “seems to have been caused partly by the difference between the languages, partly by the difference in cultural codes and reference systems” (196). The Japanese Matilda is a serious and moral book, and its author, controversially judged by British critics, is praised in Japan for his “morality” (201). The approach to the problem of cultural references which has been introduced by Christiane Nord (1993) may well be the most fertile one, as far as methodology is concerned. The book selected as a test case is Alice in wonderland which, from a French point of view, has justifiably been called “un texte totalement ethnocentrique” (Nières 1988: 408). Nord compares translations of the book in five languages with the help of Els Oksaar’s semiotic concept of “cultureme”, a term for “the abstract units of communicative human action and behaviour” (Nord 1993: 397). With this concept in mind, Nord singles out units in those three dimensions of the world of the source text, which are determined by culture: “background situation” (e.g. English eating-habits: “orange marmalade”), “current situation” (e.g. lower-class accent of the footman) and “references of action” (e.g., in phatic communication, the address “my dear”). In the target text the pinpointed culture markers may be preserved, neutralised or adapted, and thus create or avoid the impression of cultural distance. The Alice version in Brazilian Portuguese turns out to be the only consistent one insofar as it adapts the culture markers throughout; all the other translations are irritating mixtures of foreign and familiar elements. Enzensberger’s German translation, for instance, “tends to adapt the situation, but to leave the action — especially communicative action — marked as foreign” (413). As a representative of the skopos theory Nord claims that a translator should decide whether to strive for cultural distance (perhaps in order to convey knowledge about foreign cultures) or to aim at a reading experience motivated by identification. In any case, a translator should create a coherent text.
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5. The impact of the target culture A considerable number of critical studies have accumulated to be dealt with in this chapter and a subdivision seems advisable. As it is difficult to find clearly defining categories for such a framework, the following attempt can only claim to be of temporary value. There is a recognizable group of studies by Gideon Toury and scholars who refer to his notions of Descriptive Translation Studies. Tiina Puurtinen (1995: 43) talks of a “Tourian approach” (which she adapts for her own research project). It is the concept of “norms” of the target culture which those scholars seem to share. Yet before and after Toury’s elaboration of the concept the impact of the target culture on the translation of children’s books has been acknowledged, too, more or less in the sense of a forming (or rather: deforming) ideology. So the term “ideology” will be used to cover those otherwise heterogeneous studies (including some which are unmistakably source-text oriented). Linguistic aspects are involved when the impact of norms or ideology is pursued into the grammatical structure of the language used in the target text. Investigations of this type, almost exclusively represented by Puurtinen, will make up a third section of this chapter. 5.1 Norms The intellectual home of the norm-oriented approach within Translation Studies appears to be Tel Aviv University, where “Itamar Even-Zohar first introduced the term ‘polysystem’ for the aggregate of literary systems (including everything from ‘high’ or ‘canonised’ forms . . . such as poetry to ‘low’ or ‘noncanonised’ forms [e.g. children’s literature and popular fiction] in a given culture” (Gentzler 1993: 105). Gideon Toury, a younger colleague, took up Even-Zohar’s notion of the importance of translated literature in literary history and developed a theory of “norms” that influence translation decisions in the target culture (Toury 1980; 2000). Translation activity takes place “in socioculturally relevant settings” (2000: 198) governed by norms, the effect of which can only be reliably studied in the products of that activity: in written translations, though “semi-theoretical or critical formulations” about them may be worth taking into account (2000: 207). The main distinction Toury makes is that between “adequacy” and “acceptability” of translations: “Whereas adherence to source norms determines a translation’s adequacy as compared to the source text, subscription to norms originating in the target culture determines acceptability” (2000: 201).
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5.1.1 Theory-oriented case studies In the case of translated children’s literature, the choice of norms depends on the position of translated literature in the target literary system (Toury 1980: 142). According to Even-Zohar, translations are usually regarded as being of secondary importance and constituting a “peripheral system” inside the polysystem. Their “foremost aim is acceptability in the target system”. However, there are also the rarer cases when they might serve to strengthen the weak centre of the target polysystem by aiming for adequacy. Toury exemplifies that “the history of literary translation from German into Hebrew . . . is a motion from the center of Hebrew literature to its periphery” (142). His test case are the four Hebrew versions of Max und Moritz. The first version of 1898 strives for adequacy to such a degree that it even risks violation of religious norms. “The wish to introduce into Hebrew children’s literature something that it was lacking was stronger than the translator’s necessity to subject himself to some of the norms that were already established in it” (144). The fourth version of 1965, on the other hand, is “based on previous translations and adaptations” and shows a high rate of conformity to “the norms prevalent in the Hebrew system” (141). Even more meticulously, Toury (1995: 147–165) demonstrates a tendency towards acceptability in a Hebrew translation of a German Schlaraffenland text. The original fairy tale of the land of milk and honey, which had been recorded by Ludwig Bechstein, was tightened by Tom Freud in 1921 to become a children’s story and then transformed into a characteristically Hebrew text by the national Hebrew poet Chaim Nahman Bialik, who introduced as a mediating model an accepted Russian narrative structure. In his conclusion Toury emphasizes that though translation is a free decision-making process, even the renowned (and innovative) poet preferred to adhere to the norms existing in the ruling system of Hebrew literature when he did translation. Zohar Shavit (1992; a variant: 1997) has investigated the beginnings of Jewish-Hebrew children’s literature in the early 19th century. As she illustrates with several titles, representatives of the Jewish-Hebrew Enlightenment (Haskalah) Movement translated Joachim Heinrich Campe’s didactic German children’s books as textual models for originally Hebrew children’s books. Even more fundamentally than in the case of the first Hebrew translation of Max und Moritz, an endeavour for adequacy of translation is indicative of attempts to introduce something new into a literary system. So that endeavour is recognisably caused by the target culture.
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Nitsa Ben-Ari (1992) in a much quoted study elucidates the translational reception of German children’s literature in Israel after World War II. She formulates as a principle of literary translation “that considerations of adequacy … will always come second to considerations of acceptability in the Target Literature” (1992: 221), and she exemplifies succinctly that in her test case acceptability is brought about by “three sets of norms: (1) the universal patterns of translation …; (2) the didactic norms pertaining to children’s literature per se; and (3) the delicate and intricate didactic attitude [in Israel] to the German culture in particular” (222). The constraints of the target culture for the translation of children’s literature are graphically conspicuous when Basmat Even-Zohar (1992) confronts Astrid Lindgren’s preference for authentic current Swedish vernacular with the demands in Israel to use “the ‘correct’ and ‘rich’ form of traditional literary Hebrew” in the production of children’s literature (1992: 244). She also hints at a certain similarity between Hebrew and Russian translations of Lindgren (242; see Skott 1977). However, she is aware of a development of Hebrew children’s literature “in the direction of the modern tongue”, which will continue to be reflected in translated children’s literature (244). Rachel Weissbrod (1996) reveals the impact of Jewish-Hebrew culture on translation in the handling of wordplay, just as Even-Zohar (1992) traces it in the responses to the printed vernacular. The three complete Hebrew translations of Alice in wonderland, separated by periods of about 30 years, represent different varieties of impact. The first two versions strive for acceptability, one (1926) at a sociocultural, the other (1951) at a stylistic level. The third (1987) is intent on adequacy, which was at that time adhered to even in children’s literature. In another article Weissbrod (1999) shows that the demands for employing an elevated Hebrew style in the translation of humorous texts may result in mock epic, an 18th-century English genre which presents trivial characters and incidents in the elevated language of the classical epos. One of Weissbrod’s four examples is the Hebrew version of the children’s classic Winnie-the-Pooh, a translation of 1943 which, in its mock-epic dimension, is amusing, but only for adults and in a way different from the humour of the original. Miryam Du-Nour (1995) sums up earlier analyses of the effect of target culture norms on the translations of children’s literature into Hebrew, but differentiates the “Tourian approach” by incorporating Vermeer’s and Nord’s notion of the purpose (skopos) of a translation for a commissioner. She concentrates on the specific purpose “to bring the book closer to the child’s heart”, which proves “to be the main justification given by ‘commissioners’ of retranslations and
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revisions of translated children’s books” (1995: 332). In her linguistically oriented review of Hebrew retranslations of some children’s classics over a span of 70 years Du-Nour reveals that this purpose vies with ideologically motivated and didactically oriented demands to teach children the traditional elevated Hebrew style. If Du-Nour is concerned with a purpose which, with regard to child readers, might be defined as psychological, the Canadian Judith Woodsworth (1996) considers a purpose which is clearly political: the promotion of national identity by means of translating successful literature into a minority language. One of Woodsworth’s two test cases is a 1994 translation of The house at Pooh corner (a sequel to Winnie-the-Pooh) into Romansch (one of the four official languages of Switzerland, also promoted by the picture book A bell for Ursli, see Schultze-Kreft 1998). It is not only the making of the Romansch translation by a Canadian linguist and some of its linguistic results which are documented, but also its institutional support and its distribution. Similar translation activities at a European level in favour of children’s books in minority languages have been pointed out in a published interview with the Scottish Gaelic writer, translator and editor Finlay Macleod (Tabbert 1991b). The reception of post-1968 “emancipatory” German children’s books in Turkey has been outlined by the Turkish scholars Selahattin Dilidüzgün and Turgay Kurultay (1992) and analysed in terms of intercultural communication by Kurultay alone (1994), who is familiar with the target-oriented approach of Toury (1980) and Shavit (1981). His discussion of translation in the context of Turkish culture (his test case is Peter Härtling’s children’s book Ben liebt Anna) appears to be more concerned with potential conflicts than most of the Israeli studies. The fundamental difference between the cultures involved may be comparable, insofar as it is rooted in religion, but instead of attending to the reception of children’s books as a completed fact of literary history, Kurultay observes the open situation for an imported type of book which is approved of by only a (liberal) minority of his compatriots. It seems to be this very limitation of the potential audience which is the reason why on the one hand (with regard to the liberal minority) the German children’s love story was deliberately translated in an “adequate” manner and on the other hand (in spite of breaking essential Turkish taboos) it was not publicly prohibited. Kurultay also addresses the problem of children’s restricted ability to participate in intercultural literary communication, which according to him cannot be solved principally, but only casuistically. In the case of Härtling’s love story he does not believe Turkish children to be overtaxed by the confrontation with unfamiliar situations,
because the translator has found compromises for the crucial passages, which preserve the impression of foreignness and yet grant readability (two options between which Nord [1993] expects a translator to decide). Kurultay’s approach resembles that of Woodsworth and of Du-Nour insofar as he seems to combine notions of the Tel-Aviv and of the Heidelberg representatives of translation theory in what could be regarded as a fruitful synthesis (see also Kurultay 2000). 5.1.2 Nation-oriented period studies In a sense the Israeli case studies introduced in the preceding section are components of a diachronic description of translated children’s books in Hebrew. Translated children’s books in Spanish and Italian have been examined in two research projects which attempt to explore a specific period of translation policy in the respective countries, namely the most recent one. In her doctoral dissertation written in Spanish, Marisa Fernandez Lopez (1996) investigates twentieth-century English-language children’s literature in Spain between 1940 and 1984. Books of that origin constitute more than 50 per cent of translated children’s books, which in turn represent 45 per cent of all the books published for young Spanish readers (1996: 94, 81). Isabella Zeli is concerned with foreign children’s literature in Italy from 1987 on, the year of “the ‘explosion’ of the children’s book market” in her country (Zeli n.d.: 7). In 1996 almost 47 per cent of the published children’s books in Italy were translations (10). Both scholars explore their field of research not only through the polysystem concept of literature and case studies of translations, but also through statistics, tables and diagrams. Fernandez Lopez points out that the Spanish reception of twentieth-century children’s literature in the English language began after the Civil War, and she distinguishes three periods of reception between 1940 and 1984, triggered by important events of political history. The development is described concisely and documented by book market statistics and lists of publishers and translators. The second half of the 340-page volume comprises analyses of translated literature, divided into three groups: (1) popular, (2) canonised, (3) high quality books [(2) referring to high quality books before, (3) after the First World War]. In her analyses Fernandez Lopez concentrates on four possible tendencies of translated literature (1996: 61) as defined by other scholars: stylistic elevation, stylistic homogeneity (Toury 1980), simplification (Shavit 1986) and cultural context adaptation (Klingberg 1986). Her final generalisation that the translation of canonised texts tends towards “adequacy” and the translation of popular texts towards “acceptability” (322) may be no
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surprise, but what counts are the carefully differentiating analyses from which this conclusion is drawn. Indeed, the methodologically sound and consistent study deserves attention from both scholars of Translation Studies and scholars of Comparative Children’s Literature. Fernandez Lopez has published essay versions of some of her case studies (on Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie, Scott O’Dell, Roald Dahl) elsewhere, and in a recent article written in English she draws an interesting picture of the nature of ideology in Spanish translations of popular British children’s books (Fernandez Lopez 2000). It may be all too obvious that the censorship under Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975) caused textual manipulations as regards sex, religion and politics. Yet striking is the observation that there is a “Spanish norm of fidelity to the original text” (33) which is even effective with regard to Enid Blyton’s popular children’s books, as Fernandez Lopez demonstrates by contrasting the Spanish translations with the French and Portuguese ones. That norm also appears to make Spanish publishers and translators stick to first editions of British texts, though “political correctness” may have caused them to be purified of racist and xenophobic elements in their country of origin (as in the cases of Blyton, Dahl and Lofting). Over the past few years the (“adequate”) translations of more recent English-language children’s books have contributed to the strengthening of the Spanish system of children’s literature and to making it similar to that of western countries such as France, which have proved to be less “permeable”. Isabella Zeli (n.d.: 7) is concerned with “the impact that imported children’s literature has on the national tradition” in Italy. She presents her research in a 50-page thesis, supplemented by 21 documentary attachments. The work, which was written for the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, has not been published as a book, but is available in the International Youth Library, Munich. If, according to the statistical material reproduced by Zeli, 1987 marks the beginning of an astonishing increase in the number of books for children in Italy (20 years later than in North European countries), then the publisher Salani played an important role in that development, insofar as he introduced a special collection and by doing so paved the way for a growing number of translations, especially of English authors (13), led by Roald Dahl, a best-selling children’s writer in Italy. So there is good reason for Zeli’s decision to focus her research on that publishing house, its collections and translation policy (which is itself of special methodological interest), and to dedicate a case study of cultural transfer to Roald Dahl. She shows that, compared with France and the
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Netherlands, four main books of his were translated relatively late in Italy, as the Italian system was not prepared for that type of children’s literature. A detailed analysis of the layout and the language of the Italian version of Dahl’s book The twits reveals that it tends to be close to the original, as opposed to the French translation which adapts the book for French child readers (a justification for which is provided by the translator Marie Raymond-Farré in Escarpit 1985: 148–151). Zeli’s final conclusion is reminiscent of Fernandez Lopez’s research concerning Spain: “The position of children’s literature in the Italian literary system is very marginal, at the periphery, consequently the foreign production has easily gained the centre” (45). Zeli refers to an interesting statement by Salani’s influential editor-in-chief Donatella Ziliotti, which would be worth an additional comparative study: “The few interesting [Italian children’s writers] belong to the new generation of Italian authors, influenced by the new trend coming from the North European countries, not concerned with moral or pedagogical goals” (16). 5.2 Ideology The concept of norms controlling translation, introduced by Toury (1980; 2000), is carefully related to sociology and social psychology. The term “ideology”, which is mentioned in some of the studies discussed in this section and applied to all of them, is used in the somewhat vague sense of a dictionary definition: “a body of ideas that reflects the beliefs and interests of a nation, political system etc” (Collins English Dictionary 1991: 771). In none of the studies is ideology linked with the polysystem theory of literature, as is the case with Fernandez Lopez (2000). No matter whether the word is used or not, the fact of ideology manifests itself as a semantic difference between source text and target text. As far as the translation of historical children’s books is concerned (mostly so-called “classics”), historical distance tends to set off ideological difference. In the case of contemporary children’s books, the difference is solely that which exists per se between two cultures. The French comparatist Isabelle Nières is familiar with translations of both historical and contemporary children’s books. Following a graphic sketch (1992) of the European interchange of didactic children’s literature in the 18th century, and of the classic mythological, Christian and oral heritage shared by children’s literature in various languages, she attempts a new approach to the question of translation (Nières-Chevrel 1998), one which she had already treated earlier (in Escarpit 1985:35–54). On the one hand she gives examples of an ideological
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impact of the target culture, with special regard to the transfer of children’s books between Protestant and Catholic cultures, whilst on the other hand she demonstrates the”creative” force of translation, in France e.g. by recently paving the way for a new type of picture book (106–107) or for nonsense literature à la Lewis Carroll (120–121). The function of translation which she calls “contourner des situations idéologiques bloquées et renouveler les motifs littéraires” (107) is reminiscent of that which in a systemic approach has been called “modelling the centre of the [target] polysystem” (Toury 1980:142). 5.2.1 Historical children’s books abroad A good deal of those historical children’s books which are known as classics are (in the traditional sense of the word) “adaptations” of books written for adults. Frequently this age-specific adjustment coincides with the process of translation or, more correctly: cultural transfer. In order to limit the scope of the present article, the numerous translation analyses concerning that border-line case of adult and children’s literature will be mentioned here only by a few titles, for which the ideology of the target culture is of major importance. Margareta Winqvist (1973) in her tracing of the reception of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in Sweden, and Dieter Petzold (1982) in his summarising studies of German versions of the book for children, concur in drawing attention to variations of didactic reduction of a complex work of world literature. A distinct political component can be identified in the ideological implications of German adaptations of Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales for young readers, as shown by Irmgard Egger (1991) and Philipp Löser (1998). And if the Danish Ugly duckling, a quintessential Andersen story, is a miniature Bildungsroman for both children and adults, Andrew Lang’s English version brings it close to the prototype of fairy tale for children, including restrictive Victorian norms, as revealed by Viggo H. Pedersen (1990). The ideological content of 19th-century children’s books may be strongly determined by religion. David Blamires (1994) reminds us of the German author Christoph von Schmid, who, though a Catholic priest, wrote widely read children’s stories in which the “presentation of Christianity . . . is remarkable in that it contains little that is specifically Catholic” (73). Attractive to the Sunday school market, Schmid’s best known story Das Blumenkörbchen has been translated into English at least five times, and what is particularly significant is the fact that the first two versions were made to conform to Evangelical dogmatism by means of added authorial comments and quotations, which appear to have granted them a much higher print run than two later transla-
tions which were quite “faithful”. While Schmid was “evangelised” through additions, the American Louisa M. Alcott was secularised through omissions, as Kari Skjønsberg (1979: 37–77) points out in the four Norwegian versions of the novel Little women (1868). What is deleted in all the versions are the explicit intertextual references to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s progress, which constitute a religious framework in the Puritan tradition. In her Norwegian collection of essays Skjønsberg (1979) is concerned with the various meanings of the term “adaptation”, and in the somewhat different Swedish edition of her essays (1982) she also includes a quantitative analysis of the Swedish classic Nils Holgersson in five West European languages. This analysis could be supplemented by studies of its reception in Russia and Poland (Nikolajeva 1991; Teodorowicz-Hellman 1999). Skjønsberg’s conclusion is also applicable to other children’s classics: “It seems that though Nils Holgersson is known the world over, not two countries know the same story” (1982: 149). International variants of Alice in wonderland are referred to elsewhere in this article (Sections 4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 6), and contributions on multilingual transformations of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi and of Erich Kästner’s children’s books will be collected in forthcoming proceedings of commemorative symposia (Böhler/Rutschmann; Dolle-Weinkauff/Ewers 2002. As to Heidi see also Abgottspon 2001). Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio has proved to be one of the busiest border crossers, since he was created in 1880 to help promote Tuscan Italian as the standard language of a new nation state. There are at least 38 translations into German alone (Richter 1996: 125). The Austrian linguist Sonia Marx has dedicated her doctoral thesis (Marx 1990) to a fair selection of these translations, after the comparatist Erwin Koppen (1980) elucidated how, in an early attempt of 1905, the German author O. J. Bierbaum deliberately transformed the fairy tale novel with a Tuscan setting into a satire on Wilhelminian Germany. Marx has traced the German-language editions (added and slightly corrected data in Richter 1996 and O’Sullivan 2000: 405–414) and analysed selected passages in terms of categories proposed by Klingberg (“context adaptation” in Klingberg/Ørvig/Amor 1978: 84–89) and Reiss (1982). A glance at the first and the last of the examined versions (Anton Grumann 1913 / Christine Nöstlinger 1988) reveals to what degree each of the new Pinocchios is a child of his time, in those two cases as far as the educational style which is vicariously applied to the hero is concerned (antiauthoritarian versus authoritarian). Analyses of the vocabulary show that there may also be a strong dialect or regional component in the impact of the target culture, which is particularly obvious in the Swiss
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version and the older Austrian ones. Marx’s approach is not explicitly target-oriented, though a more recent presentation of her results in German under the heading “produktive Rezeption” tends in that direction (Marx 1997: 179–201), as do two chapters by other scholars, who take up some of her results (Richter 1996: 125–137; O’Sullivan 2000: 405–419). American sociologist Richard Wunderlich (1992) has related the success of various Pinocchio adaptations in his country to phases of social history, and perhaps it takes a sociologist to consider so convincingly the ideological impact of a target culture on the reception of a literary symbol. But then one must not expect discussions of linguistic subtlety. More than any other figure in children’s literature Pinoccio has become a national symbol (Richter 1996: 146) and as such seems to be supported by the “Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi di Pescia”. That institution has not only sponsored Marx’s book about Pinocchio in the German-speaking countries, but also a similar bibliographic and linguistic investigation of Pinocchio in Spain, where he emerges in five languages spoken in the country (Mercedes Gómez del Manzano/Gabriel Janer Manila 1996). Publications sponsored earlier trace the Italian child hero to Czechoslovakia, France and the U.S. (Richter 1996:183–184). 5.2.2 Contemporary children’s books abroad If there is one literary figure who surpasses Pinocchio’s popularity with children all over the world, it must be Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, who, since she entered the public stage in the crucial year of 1945, can also be regarded as a herald of contemporary children’s literature. It took quite a while for the untutored spirit of independence, incorporated by the Swedish enfant terrible, to be accepted without reservations by adult mediators of children’s literature, especially beyond the Swedish border. Translations of the book into various languages and their revisions testify to this hesitant approval, as shown in several studies. The most comprehensive study so far, also informed by modern translation theory, is the unpublished doctoral dissertation of the German Scandinavist Astrid Surmatz on the German reception of Astrid Lindgren and its international context (1998). Germany has proved to be a gateway to Europe for Lindgren’s books, as it has for modern Scandinavian literature in general. In a chapter which modifies a previous article written in Swedish (1994), Surmatz focuses on a number of passages in the German translation of Pippi Långstrump of 1949, in which Pippi’s behaviour is modified in order not to deviate from predominant educational norms. In the 1980s the publisher of that edition
responded to the criticism of a Scandinavist and had Pippi’s original form of independence more or less restituted, also in accordance with current educational trends. In another chapter Surmatz considers translations of the “modern classic” into other languages. The sequence of reception follows a line from the North West of Europe to the South and finally to the East and to Asia. In France, Surmatz notes a process of translational revision comparable to that in Germany: from “acceptability” to “adequacy”, one might say in Tourian terms. From her own and other analyses of foreign versions of Lindgren’s children’s books, Surmatz concludes: The more avant-garde or subversive a text is and the more it fuses narrative forms of realism and of fantasy, the more conspicuous are the translators’ interferences. These, however, have been decreasing since the 1960s when Lindgren was widely acknowledged as a major writer. Lindgren in French seems to be particularly challenging for critics. There is a survey article by Anna Birgitta Erikson (1985) and an analysis of the Pippi translation by Christina Heldner (1992), which focuses on the French fear of “subversive education” and on reservations about an oral style of narration (also to be found among Israeli editors, Even-Zohar 1992). Denise von Stockar points out the suppression of emancipatory elements in the French translation not only of Pippi, but also of Christine Nöstlinger’s Conrad, a quite explicit model of antiauthoritarian education, and furthermore the elimination of nuances of child psychology in the translation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the wild things are (Rutschmann/von Stockar 1996: 35–65. Her positive evaluation of the German translation of Wild things is in contrast to that in Schelbert 1975). Karin van Camp (1995) feels stimulated by Lindgren’s own criticism of the French version of Pippi to plead for a revision of the Dutch version, in which quite a few instances of Swedish wordplay remained untranslated, rendering the heroine less funny. Ewa Teodorowicz-Hellman, who has analysed the Polish translation in a Polish and in a Swedish contribution (1997; 1999: 61–81), finds the transformed heroine “more vociferous and less rebellious” (1999: 114). The problem of translating the humour of the book is thoroughly examined in terms of linguistics, reader psychology and Klingberg’s and Reiss’s translation theory. Lindgren’s Karlsson in Russian and Ronja in Icelandic have been analysed by Skott (1977) and Hauksson (1985) respectively. Just like Pippi Långstrump a number of other excellent children’s books, which originated in a liberal world-view in post-war Germany, were subjected to more conservative and restrictive norms, as pointed out by several critics: Leo Lionni’s American picture book Swimmy (Meckling 1975), Tove Jansson’s Finno-Swedish Moomin books (Bode 1995; Jendis 2001, in accordance with the “Tourian”
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approach of target-oriented translation analysis, including illustrations), and Michael Bond’s English Paddington stories (Osberghaus 1997). Monika Osberghaus, in her unpublished M. A. thesis, is explicitly target-oriented insofar as she relates the translated stories to children’s literature in the target culture of the same period (she talks of Zeitgebundenheit, “period dependence”, of translation), in a way similar to Fernandez Lopez (1996) and Surmatz (1994; 1998). In this case the critic herself has made practical use of her attentive reading of the target text, producing a revised and more “adequate” version which attempts to reconstruct the humour of the original (Jung 1996: 19). In the West German translations of the Soviet Russian children’s books by Jurij Korinec, the distance between source and target cultures is particularly wide, as the two cultures are based on contrasting political systems. As a predictable consequence there are drastic abbreviations and alterations, which Wolfram Eggeling (1994) reveals with regard to Dort, weit hinter dem Fluss [Tam, vdali, za rekoj], Korinec’s best-known novel, and Iris Seemann (1987), in her unpublished doctoral dissertation, with regard to all West German translations of his books. In the meantime Seemann (1999) has published an encyclopedic presentation of all traceable West German versions of Soviet Russian children’s books between 1945 and 1989, target-oriented insofar as it is related to six phases of foreign relations between West Germany and the U. S. S. R., though evaluative rather than descriptive in its considerations of translation. Certainly it is a most useful volume for practical work with children’s literature, primarily in the area of intercultural education. As far as the publishing aspect of intercultural relations is concerned three facts are worth mentioning: The West German reception of Soviet Russian children’s books is dominated by one single translator, the author Hans Baumann (Seemann 1999: 36–39); his translation of Korinec’s main work Dort, weit hinter dem Fluss is paralleled by a more “faithful” East German version, and is the basis for all the other translations in the capitalist West, except the Danish one (Seemann 1987: 263). The two phenomena, personal dominance in cultural transfer between two countries and translated translations, both of which are not uncommon in children’s literature, would be worth studying in their own right. 5.3 Sentence structure As far as the language of translated children’s books is concerned, it is usually considered in terms of lexis, semantics or semiotics, and sometimes pragmatics. Very rarely are questions of grammar touched upon, only when two languages
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as distant as English and Japanese are involved, as in the case of the Japanese version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda (Netley 1992). The German linguist Judith Macheiner (1995, i.e. Monika Doherty) — who does not focus on children’s literature, but draws quite a few examples from Enzensberger’s German version of the two Alice books — bases her theory of translation on a major difference between English and German sentence structures: In English the informational climax is in the middle of a sentence, in German at the beginning or at the end. Macheiner’s main criterion for the quality of a translation is its “adequacy” to the grammatical and stylistic rules of the target language, such as those concerning the sentence structure. “Adequacy” in this sense she claims to be more important than concurrence between source and target text with regard to form (which she calls “analogy”), and content (“equivalence”). In the field of translated children’s books it is the Finnish scholar of Translation Studies Tiina Puurtinen who uses sentence structure as a vantage point of her research, the results of which she has published in her doctoral dissertation (Puurtinen 1995) and in preceding and subsequent articles (1989; 1994; 1997). Puurtinen, who is well-versed in both the Tel Aviv and the Heidelberg theories of translation, hopes to explain the linguistic acceptability of translated children’s books by the readability (and corresponding speakability) of a text, which in turn she sees as depending on its dominant sentence structure. This objective requires a variety of research methods. Linguistic analysis is the basis for empirical tests. The target texts which Puurtinen chooses are two Finnish translations of Frank L. Baum’s American fantasy novel The wizard of Oz (1900). Both versions appeared in 1977, but whereas one of them shows a predilection for nonfinite constructions (such as contracted sentences or premodified participial attributes), which results in a static style, the other is characterised by frequent use of finite constructions, which results in a dynamic style. As contemporary Finnish children’s literature unmistakably favours a dynamic style (as Puurtinen deduces from her syntactic analysis of 40 originally Finnish children’s books and 40 translations into Finnish), the dynamic translation can be expected to be more acceptable than the static one. Comparative cloze tests with children (filling in gaps in excerpts from the two translations) and speakability tests with both children and adults (all of which are carefully recorded) lead to differentiating conclusions. These are summarised in the final chapter of the dissertation (1995: 214–232) and in a separate article in Target (1997). In the present review the quotation of one concluding paragraph must suffice to convey an impression of the methodological scrupulousness of Puurtinen’s research:
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The definition of linguistic acceptability in translated children‘s literature can now be reformulated as follows: the degree of linguistic acceptability is determined by the readability and speakability level appropriate to a particular group of readers (e.g. of a certain age), conformity to the linguistic norms of the relevant genre and literary subsystem (of translated literature or original TL literature), and/or conformity to the expectations of a particular group of readers (or even to the unique expectations of individual readers). As became evident from the findings of this study, measurements of these three dimensions do not always correlate. There are different kinds of acceptability, and therefore the initial unitary notion of acceptability must be replaced by a more complex, flexible concept, which allows of such heterogeneity. (1995: 230)
If the last sentence refers to the concept of acceptability as introduced by the Tel Aviv theory of translation, the polysystem notion of literature which is also echoed in this paragraph (as indeed in the whole study), Puurtinen is selfcritical enough to also realise the limited validity of her own research project: One of the shortcomings of the present dissertation likely to arouse criticism is its concentration on one linguistic aspect — the contrast between finiteness and nonfiniteness — and one kind of children’s literature — fantasy stories and fairy tales. (1995: 231)
Consciousness of incompleteness is an indication of reliability of results and a stimulant for further research.
6. Translating for children Emer O’Sullivan (1991; 1992) has emphasised the importance of the literary communication structure for the translation of children’s literature. In stories such as Alice in wonderland, which Shavit (1986: 63) calls “ambivalent” because they are part of both the children’s and the adult system of literature, O’Sullivan distinguishes at least two types of implied readers, child reader and adult reader, and she raises the question of what happens to such multiple addressed stories in translation. In a detailed case-study of two German translations of A.A. Milne’s children’s classic Winnie-the-Pooh she points out that in one of the target texts the multiplicity of the implied reader has been preserved and in the other it has been reduced to an implied child reader, a fact which is by no means uncommon in translated children’s literature (O’Sullivan 1994). With regard to adults and children Isabelle Nières (1988), in her French dissertation, explicitly distinguishes two types of editions and of reception of Alice in wonderland in France.
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In a more recent article O’Sullivan (1999a) has differentiated her approach by taking up ideas from Hermans 1996 and Schiavi 1996. The implied communication situation of a target text is represented by a complex model (O’Sullivan 1999a: 47, also 2000: 247). The model helps us to realise that in a target text three different voices may be distinguished: the voice of the fictitious narrator of the source text, the voice of the implied translator and the voice of the fictitious narrator of the target text. In two brief case-studies O’Sullivan outlines to what degree the narrator’s voice in a target text may break away from that of the fictitious narrator of the source text: in the German version of Roald Dahl’s The Vicar of Nibbleswick the narrator turns a passage of wordplay into a language lesson and in Irina Korschunow’s German version of John Burningham’s picture book Granpa a sparse dialogue between a girl and her grandfather, who finally dies, has been replaced by a sentimentalised narration from the girl’s point-of-view. O’Sullivan has expanded on her model of translational communication in a key chapter of her recent treatise on Comparative Children’s Literature (2000: 241–274). More examples from earlier analyses have been well integrated in that chapter. Unfortunately, she hardly ever refers to the concepts of her model in two subsequent chapters on the translation of picture books and the comprehensive history of German versions of Alice in wonderland. Surely those concepts could have lent more precision to her results. It would be of particular interest to see how, in the case of picture books, the visual element could be fitted into the model of translational communication. The Finnish translation scholar Riitta Oittinen appears to be concerned primarily with the child reader — the real one, not the implied one. In her dissertation, subtitled “On the dialogics of translating for children” (1993; a brief variant: 1995), she draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic theory of literature and on Christiane Nord’s modification of the skopos theory of translation, and passionately asserts that especially with regard to children, it is more important to be “loyal” towards the target language readers than “faithful” to the source text. She rejects the traditional idea of the “invisibility” of the translator and stresses the impact which a translator’s child image has on his or her translation of children’s literature. She herself favours the “carnivalistic” traits which Bakhtin ascribes to the child’s world picture. There is a clear dividing-line which Oittinen draws between her own attitude towards translating for children and the attitudes of Klingberg and Shavit. This is made explicit with regard to versions of Gulliver’s travels for children in which so-called indecent passages have been deleted. While for
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Klingberg the deletion shows a lack of respect for the integrity of the original work of art, and for Shavit it is a symptom of the inferior status of children’s literature, Oittinen regrets that “the adaptor has not dived into children’s carnivalism” (1993: 105), which includes fascination of human excretions. Oittinen’s plea for liberating the translator from the fetters of the source text becomes understandable when one considers the communicative situation she envisages and the examples of translation she prefers. Reading aloud to preschoolers is the situation she is herself familiar with, undoubtedly a dialogic event, in which the impact of a text and the feedback of the audience is very direct; and the examples of texts which she discusses in some detail are either adaptations of children’s rhymes or reworkings of stories by Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll and Tove Jansson. In either case poetic license is traditionally conceded. But it is a daring conclusion from case studies like these to demand a change of copyright laws so that a translator, as an “author translator”, is on an equal footing with the author. With this aim in mind “the publisher should be included in the dialogic constellation contributing to the translation” (182). But which translator is really equal to a Dahl, Carroll or Jansson and which publisher might be willing to concede “carnivalistic” freedom to a translator as a dialogic negotiator with children? Sometimes the voice of the artist seems to gain the upper hand in the translation scholar: Riitta Oittinen is also a practising illustrator and film maker. One may well ask if Oittinen overtaxes the meaning of the term “loyalty”. Christiane Nord, whom she quotes, uses it with regard to an Auftraggeber (i.e. “commissioner”, Nord 1989: 102; “initiator” in Nord 1991: 93). However, children could only be commissioners of translations in a figurative sense; it is the publishers who are normally the real commissioners. The difference itself is a potential source of controversy concerning translations for children which can be solved neither by idealising the listening child in a Bakhtinian or Rousseauist manner nor by demonising publishers, possibly from a Marxist point of view. It is doubtful whether there is a better approach but Turgay Kurultay’s casuistic realism to be of help in this question. Oittinen’s fresh impulses could perhaps lead to new insights if her model situation of reading out ad hoc translations to pre-schoolers were to be investigated empirically. Oittinen herself did not go in that direction when she published a slightly enlarged and bibliographically updated version of her dissertation in 2000. The main addition is a chapter on the three Finnish translations of Alice in wonderland dating from 1906, 1972 and 1995, a chapter based on her Finnish book Liisa, Liisa ja Alice (1997). In her comparison of the three versions she seems
to come close to the Tel Aviv school of descriptive translation studies by considering the changes of the target culture which have had an impact on the respective translations. She uses Lawrence Venuti’s (1995) terms, though, when she sums up her comparison as follows: “While Swan and Kunnas have domesticated their translations and deleted anything strange for Finnish readers, Martin has solved the problem otherwise, she has foreignised her text so that the reader can feel the otherness of the story” (139). It is still the situations she is interested in, though now in historical terms, and not systems of literature: “The three Finnish Alices clearly show that translations are always created in unique situations that influence translators’ ways of reading and understanding texts” (142).
7. Translators’ experiences Theorists should not ignore the experiences of those whose practice they reflect upon. In fact some of those who have dealt with theoretical questions concerning the translation of children’s books, have themselves translated such books (e.g. Ben-Ari, Even-Zohar, Görlach, Krutz-Arnold, Oittinen, Osberghaus, Shavit, Toury). Of the many professional statements put into print, only a few can be referred to in this chapter, grouped according to the translators’ native language. Although English may not be important as a target language in the International encyclopedia of children’s literature (Hunt 1996: 519–529), Ronald Jobe illustrates “the translation process” with telling statements by American, Canadian and British translators, who perceive themselves to be searching for “the most evocative equivalent word” (Fenton), trying “to be true to the artist in the author” (Crampton), believing that the translator must “be a writer herself” (Poluskin) or that “one is interpreting as an actor does” (Bell). Patricia Crampton (1990) has written on her experiences with Lindgren’s Swedish and Anthea Bell (1985 a, b, 1986) on translating Nöstlinger’s German, Andersen’s Danish and the French of the Astérix comics. Two topics deserve special mention because they are rarely focused upon: verse for children (Bell 1998) and picture books (Tate 1990). The compendium on French translations of children’s literature contains a special section (Escarpit 1985: 147–160) in which the translators are explicitly represented by four practitioners (Farre, Poslaniec, Faucompre, Vassallo). Their statements follow a questionnaire aimed at elucidating the relation between translator, literary work, child reader and éditeur. Éditeurs seem to have a strong
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influence on translated children’s books in France and it makes sense that the contributions of five editors to the compendium, also subjected to a questionnaire, precede those of the translators. Two renowned translators, Odile Belkeddar and François Mathieu, have written articles in which they describe the professional situation of French translators of children’s literature, including the financial aspect (La Revue des Livres pour Enfants 1992: 57–64). In the international volume edited by Klingberg/Ørvig/Amor (1978: 46–50) it is a Spanish voice which represents the practising translators: Carmen BravoVillasante, known for her translations of English and German classics. The fact that she emphasizes the criterion of “faithfulness” is in accordance with what, many years later, Fernandez Lopez (2000: 33) says about “the Spanish norm of fidelity to the original text”, even in the case of children’s literature. Spanish translators of children’s books in the English language are listed in Fernandez Lopez’s dissertation (1996: 177–178). The situation of translators in West Germany is described by Gerda Neumann (1979) and, following the reunification with East Germany, elucidated with the help of questionnaires by Rieken-Gerwing (1995: 113–142). If Neumann also discusses linguistic items in the light of her work with young adult novels from Scandinavia, France and the U. S., the more unusual problems of cultural transfer between Japan and Germany are touched upon by Mariko Sato (Krebs 1990), and those between Nigeria and Germany by Martini-Honus/Martini (1997/98). An interesting experiment was carried out and documented by the editors of the East German journal Beiträge zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (“Literatur des Auslands” 1983). The editors asked four professional translators to produce German versions of a Russian children’s story by Juri Kowal and invited them to discuss the results. The German versions and the justifications and objections in the course of the discussion clearly show that a translation is not a replica in another language, but rather an implied interpretation. The Austrian Wolf Harranth (1991), known for award-winning translations of children’s books from English-speaking countries, lists and exemplifies typical language problems which he has come across as a translator and as a critical reader of translations. With reviewers of children’s books in mind he points out symptoms which might be indicative of a successful or an unsuccessful translation, even if the source text is not at hand. His specifications are useful. For in the practical work of reviewing or recommending children’s books, selecting them for prizes or for teaching purposes assessment of translational quality cannot be ignored (see Tabbert 1998: 108–110 about the jury for the German Children’s Book Prize).
However, the present survey of theoretical approaches to the translation of literature in general and children’s literature in particular may have brought home the fact that it is not enough to simply focus on linguistic problems. The function a translated children’s book is expected to fulfil has also to be taken into account, and the norms determining the translation of such a book may well change from culture to culture and from period to period. French Fifi Brindacier and Israeli Alizza may be stepsisters of Swedish Pippi Långstrump and British Alice respectively, but would they be more acceptable for their time and their culture if they were twins? And if of the two Finnish grandnieces of Dorothy, the American girl who meets the Wizard of Oz, one is static and the other dynamic, both have proved to be acceptable as Finns, albeit for different people and different groups of people.
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Résumé La littérature pour enfants, traditionnellement réservée aux enseignants et aux bibliothécaires, est devenue un objet de recherches universitaires depuis une trentaine d’années. Parallèllement, de plus en plus d’études ont été consacrées à la question des traductions de livres pour enfants. Pour comprendre cette évolution, il faut compter avec les quatre facteurs suivants: (1) l’idée que les livres traduits pour enfants construisent des ponts entre des cultures différentes, (2) les défis textuels auxquels se trouve confronté le traducteur, (3) la théorie du polysystème qui conçoit la littérature pour enfants comme un sous-système littéraire de moindre prestige, (4) les destinataires des traductions, qu’ils soient lecteurs implicites ou réels. L’analyse des différentes démarches critiques est structurée de manière à
Approaches to the translation of children’s literature
montrer le glissement méthodologique d’une orientation de type “sourcier” vers une orientation de type “cibliste”. Author’s address Reinbert Tabbert Hans-Grischkat-Str. 3 D – 72766 REUTLINGEN Germany e-mail: [email protected]
